


there and back again

by hellokatzchen (Bether)



Series: Alphabet Meme [14]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Bickering, Canon Compliant, Drabble, Gen, Happy Ending, Humor, Internal Monologue, Not Beta Read, One Shot, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-13
Updated: 2010-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-12 15:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bether/pseuds/hellokatzchen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>T is for Transporter || Good luck convincing Leonard McCoy to use the transporters. (or, how you know Christine Chapel really runs Sickbay)</p>
            </blockquote>





	there and back again

**Author's Note:**

> For Noel who requested the prompt "transporter" with something STXI. Set post-film. The title is the same as the long version of _The Hobbit_ but that's purely coincidental.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** Characters mentioned are used without permission and are trademarks of CBS/Paramount/Gene Roddenberry. I do not own them and am simply borrowing for my purposes. Please don't sue.

How he'd ended up with such a damn pushy woman for his head nurse, Leonard McCoy would never know. (Except he did—he had final say over his staff, after all. Somehow that fact escaped him, though, as she herded him through the _Enterprise_.) "I don't care what you say, God damn it," he said loudly, startling a pair of science officers heading the opposite direction, "there has to be another way!"

Chapel was unruffled by his bellowing, as per the usual. "Dr. McCoy," she replied in her Calming Nurse voice, "you're being ridiculous."

"I'm not!" he objected. (They were in the turbolift now—how did she do that?) "Those things are deathtraps!"

That earned him a roll of her eyes. "That's what you say about the shuttles—and spaceships and space itself," she pointed out.

McCoy was getting damn tired of her logical responses—one Spock was plenty! (Not to mention that it made it a lot harder to argue with her.) "Well… that doesn't make it any less true." His retort sounded weak even to his own ears.

Chapel huffed quietly. "Oh, would you stop being such a baby already?" (Now she was shooing him off the turbolift and onto Deck Six.)

"Hmmph," he grunted. "I'll be whatever I damn well please when it's my molecules we're talking about scattering to kingdom come and, by the grace of God, back again." That being, in essence, the root of his objection to the transporter as a viable means of transportation. (He didn't care what Scotty claimed—nothing that involved dematerializing of any kind could be entirely safe. It just wasn't possible.)

They arrived in the transporter room and Chapel fixed him with a Serious Stare. "Look, those people down there need help and they don't have time to wait for a shuttlecraft. So one of us is beaming down now—and _you're_ the only one here with their MD." Which they both knew meant it should be him because there were certain procedures and lifesaving measures she simply wasn't trained to perform alone.

Cursing under his breath, McCoy grabbed the emergency medkit she was holding and stepped onto the transporter pad.

Chapel smiled sweetly at him. "It won't be that bad, Doctor—honestly, you won't feel a thing."

Closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose. "That's what I'm afraid of," he muttered.

The last thing he heard was an amused Scotty's accented statement of: "Energizing." And then—a deep nothing.

(As it turned out, his molecules did _not_ end up spread to kingdom come without coming back again. That hardly convinced McCoy of the relative merits of using transporter technology, though—something he made clear to anybody with the ability to hear.)


End file.
